Murder on the Miramichi

David Adams Richards is on familiar ground in his eighteenth novel. The inhabitants of the Miramichi, New Brunswick, are affected by a series of missteps, misalliances, and misdeeds so serious that people are killed, lives are upturned, and malevolence is triumphant. Songs of Love on a December Night takes place on conventional Richards turf, with a narrative formula practised to perfection. His readers have been here before. As he says of one of the protagonists: “He came back — as all do to the Miramichi. He came home.”

We have several deaths: accidental, inadvertent, and intentional. They are all linked. The dramatis personae consists of the standard list of Richards character types. There are the preternaturally innocent, the ideologically blinded, the hypocrites who thrive among the credulous, the essentially good souls buffeted by frauds and left-leaning dimwits, and the vulnerable misfits preyed upon by well-respected folk.

The story opens...